Rum, hookers and smuggling: the secret story of the last presidential visit to Cuba |

The true nature of the trip was mostly kept quiet at the time, but the whistle was blown 30 years later by one of the participants: journalist Beverly Smith, Jr., who went with the presidential party as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. In 1958 he published a five-page story in the Saturday Evening Post.

"The 6 day junket to Cuba and return,” wrote Smith, “had in it elements of pageantry, drama, comedy and farce; of ponderous dignity and unseemly revelry; of silk-hatted diplomacy with a dash of dipsomania. It became, in its latter stages, a large scale smuggling operation. The whole show took on a special illicit zest because it was conducted under the dour, dead-pan aegis of President Coolidge — Silent Cal, Cautious Cal, austere symbol of the old Puritan virtues, staunch upholder of the Prohibition Amendment."